


Tiny Dragons

by rosered00



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-03 03:57:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15810855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosered00/pseuds/rosered00
Summary: This is where I'll be collecting a series of little drabbles that I'm originally posting at my renamed tumblr, misadventures-in-writing





	1. Chapter 1

     The dragon broke another vase today. Looked me right in the eye and pushed the fucking thing right off the shelf. Little asshole.

     Dragons are fascinating creatures, very nearly straight out of the old fairy-tales. They were proud and regal, treasured and often revered around the globe. Their bodies were lithe and powerful all at once, with batlike wings that allowed them to soar easily through the air. Even their breath was incredible, producing bursts of flame or gas or anything elemental, really, depending on the type. 

     They were also about the size of house cats. Which coincidentally, they didn’t get along with. My own cat had sprung away from the blast of glass as the vase had shattered against the floor, hissing in irritation so profound that it was almost admirable. He did that a lot these days. The hissing, I mean. I would have thought that the scaled jerk got on his nerves more than it did mine, if I thought that were even remotely possible. 

     I’d felt Mandy’s amusement as I began gathering up the larger remains of the vase. It brushed up against the outer reaches of my mind, the mental equivalent of a feather tickling as it was trailed over my spine. In the weeks that I’d had him, I’d discovered that it wasn’t enough for the little shit to break things, he also loved to gloat about it while I cleaned up the messes he’d made. 

     That’s another thing. Dragons are intelligent as all get-out. Like, telepathic powers level intelligent. They don’t speak human languages- some people think that they can’t, others think it’s just a matter of preference. I personally think that they don’t  _ deign  _ to. Maybe I’m painting all of them with the same brush though, colour chosen courtesy of my own winged hellion. Whatever the reason, they usually communicate through things like images, senses, and emotions. The fact that they can do things like that is part of what’s made them so valuable since their discovery. 

     There are dragons out there performing search and rescue, sniffing out bombs, and helping the disabled. Then there’s mine, who sits on shelves and laughs at the cat and I. 

     Nowadays it’s hard for me to believe that just a couple of months ago I was dying to own a dragon. Would have paid good money for one, for that matter. I had actually  _ wanted  _ one. Everyone that I knew who owned one had a sweet and loving dragon, companions that they wouldn’t trade for all the world. I guess I still wanted one that would behave like that. Who wouldn’t? A mythical beast, wrapped up in a fun-sized package, complete with an affectionate and loyal disposition. 

     I guess it was just my luck that I would get stuck with Mandy, who I was quickly coming to believe might be the worst dragon in the world. 


	2. Chapter 2

Mandy wasn’t my choice, you see. Even if he was, he’s still annoying enough that I wouldn’t like him by this point anyhow. But he  _ wasn’t _ . He was a guilt-trip, if anything. An unasked-for inheritance whose purchase had been ill-advised in the first place. 

My great-grandmother had been ninety when she decided that she needed another dragon hatchling. She’d had dragons for half her life, and she wasn’t going to stop then. To hell with the fact that she was a nonagenarian and that dragons can live for a hundred years or more. 

Most of the family had said the, you know,  _ reasonable _ thing. “Hey grandma, maybe don’t get a pet right now?” No one wanted to make the rest of that point, which was more or less “seeing as you’re probably going to die in its infancy and no one wants to be saddled with it,” but it was pretty damn clear that we were all thinking that. 

_ Most  _ of us said that. With the exception of one. My darling aunt Mandy. She was all for my great-grandmother getting another dragon. It wasn’t our place to tell her it wasn’t a good idea, and grandma should go ahead and do whatever made her happy. I could understand that line of thought, to a degree. In a perfect world we could all throw reality to the side and do whatever made us feel better. But this isn’t a perfect world, and actions have consequences. Consequences like little dragon hatchlings that don’t have anywhere to go but the shelter when their owner passes away. 

It’s not like dragons are new to shelters these days. Lots of them get surrendered or abandoned. Just like with dogs, cats, and every other species the human race has ever looked at and thought “Man, those sure would be cool to keep with us.” People bought them without thinking it through properly and returned them just as fast. The same shit, different animal. 

Dear old aunt Mandy promised grandma that if she got a dragon, it wouldn’t be one of the unfortunate ones to end up in a shelter. She would take it in, she said, if anything happened to gram. If. That had been laughable. Medical technology is pretty great nowadays, but we’re a long way off from immortality. 

So grandma got her dragon. She was so thankful to Mandy for her support that she even named the thing after her. Whether she didn’t know he was a boy at the time or just didn’t care, I had no idea. The rest of the family, myself included, had just shrugged the matter off after that. Aunt Mandy could be a bit….difficult at times, to say the least, but none of us expected that she’d go back on her word. 

Except that’s exactly what she did. Shortly after grandma’s ninety-first birthday it became pretty clear that she wasn’t going to be able to live in her own house any longer. When she moved into a nursing home, Human Mandy realized that she’d actually have to pony up to her promise and take in a dragon that had, as you might have realized from how I’ve talked about him, become a complete ass. Grandma wasn’t exactly big on structure or training in her later years, and he’d just sort of been running the house for the first year of his life. So, when the time came for Human Mandy to take in Dragon Mandy, she balked and started throwing excuses at family members as fast as she could conjure them. 

I shouldn’t have agreed to take him instead. I really didn’t want to. I did have some inkling of the fact that he wasn’t well behaved, though I had absolutely no clue how much of an understatement that was. 

I owed my gram more than that, though. Even if this situation wasn’t my fault, and even if her dementia was getting so bad that she couldn’t comprehend it… She really loved him, and she would have done it for me if our situations had been somehow reversed. 

So that’s the story of how Mandy clawed his way into my life six weeks ago. The cat, Rascal, wasn’t exactly thrilled about his demotion from only pet to one of two, even if it did promote him to most well behaved pet, a development that should have been impossible with his own knack for mischief. 

The depth of Mandy’s destructive behaviour was shocking in more ways than one. He didn’t just like to ruin things or wake me up at any and all hours; sometimes he was literally  _ shocking  _ myself or the cat. A favourite game of his was to send sparks of electricity flying from his nose and watch in amusement they jolted Rascal, sometimes strongly enough to make his fur fluff out. Then it was a matter of fluttering out of reach before his actions could earn him some scratches on the nose. 

I wasn’t excluded from the fun either. He’s gotten me more times than I care to count already. 

Though, come to think of it….It has been a few days since I’ve last gotten zapped. Improvement, maybe?


End file.
